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Whistler Mayor Revels in Olympic Spotlight

WHISTLER, British Columbia — Ken Melamed, the mayor of this resort town, where the Olympic Alpine and sliding events are taking place amid bad weather, controversy and an athlete’s death, is a ski bum turned politician who voted against bringing the Games here.

That was in 2002, when Melamed was a town councilor with a record of environmental activism and what his opponents called Nimby-ism. Since being elected mayor in 2005, he has become a convert to the Olympics, earning him a new set of opponents, some disgruntled Whistlerites who think the Games are too big, too expensive and ecologically unsound.

But on Thursday, he was still upbeat in spite of long hours and relentless requests for interviews and television appearances.

“In terms of community involvement, it’s been really heartwarming to see how people have come together,” he said.

“The accident was very deflating and demoralizing,” Melamed said. “It saddened everyone. You have all these young athletes hoping to show off their excellence, and the last thing you expect on the first day of the Games is to have to offer sympathies and condolences. But there are lot of other athletes who have spent their whole lives training for this, so you have no choice. You have to go on.”

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Mayor Ken Melamed works on the Whistler Mountain ski patrol one day a week. Credit
Kim Stallknecht

Last week at Municipal Hall, a shedlike building near the ski mountain and one of the few places in Whistler that could use a coat of paint, Melamed clarified his earlier position on the Games.

“It’s a bit of a fine point, but I like to think of my vote as not against the Olympics but about were we ready,” he said. “I didn’t think we had enough security to make sure that the environment would be respected. We still hadn’t cracked the nut of resident housing. We were at the start of an economic downturn. I wanted to be sure we were ready and that the Games could happen on our terms.”

He added, “Very clearly, the community appreciated that I was willing to ask those questions.”

Melamed, 55, was probably raised to be contrarian. He grew up in Philadelphia, where his mother taught folk dancing and his father was an urban planner at the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1966, the family moved to Canada in opposition to the Vietnam War.

“My father couldn’t live with the thought that his taxes were going to support the war effort,” Melamed said.

The Melameds settled in Montreal and became “Canadianized,” as Melamed put it. His father, who had studied at the Sorbonne, was bilingual, and the family quickly made connections with the local Jewish community and the folksingers and folk dancers. Melamed threw himself into sports, skiing especially.

“It just spoke to me,” he said. “This concept of sliding down in the snow, the thrill and the exhilaration, was something I was incredibly taken with. Pretty soon, all I could dream about was skiing.”

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Melamed skied for the first time when he was 14.

Upon graduating from Dawson College in Quebec in 1973, Melamed headed west to ski — first to Jasper, Alberta; then, when he heard the season was longer there, to Whistler, where he arrived in an old Volkswagen bus. This was in 1976, and depending on your point of view, the dark or the golden age of ski-bumming. Whistler had 500 residents, 2 stores and no place to do laundry. Melamed lived in a trailer at the base of the mountain.

“There weren’t a lot of services,” he said. “There weren’t a lot of women. But it was a paradise for this small, very-tight-knit community of serious skiers. There wasn’t much grooming but lots of snow.”

After two years of operating a lift, Melamed was hired by the ski patrol, for which he has worked ever since, and he also learned stone masonry. But his main goal, he said, was “just to figure out how to maximize my skiing.”

In the late 1980s, as part of an exchange program, Melamed worked on the ski patrol in Les Arcs, France, where workers are unionized. He tried organizing the ski patrol at Whistler.

“My father was prounion, so for me, this was something I was willing to entertain,” he said. “At the time, the mountain was going through a management phase, cutting back on staff benefits and food discounts.”

Explaining that his efforts were unsuccessful, he added: “This is a part of my history that isn’t talked about that much anymore. It became quite bitter. The mountain wasn’t at all interested in having a union.”

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Melamed moved west in the 1970s and became a stone mason.

After an unsuccessful bid for the town council in 1993, Melamed, who is married and has two children, was elected in 1996 and has held office ever since.

“Perhaps the people who don’t believe in unions have forgiven me and recognized that people can change,” he said. “I think I’ve demonstrated an ability to adapt and to respect the will of the community.”

By then, he had established his credentials as an environmentalist.

“In the late ’80s, development really perked up here, and people were seeing change at a pace that very few people ever see,” he said. “It was like, just add water and things started to sprout out of the ground. We were in danger of killing the goose that laid the golden egg.”

Whistler now has a year-round population of 10,000. During the ski season, the average daily population swells to 26,000. When all the hotels are full, it can approach 50,000. The Belgian block walkways are lined with high-end shops and pricey condominiums. But ski tourism is off, and after being bought by the hedge fund Fortress Investment Group two years ago, Intrawest, the company that owns and runs Whistler’s two mountains, is in danger of foreclosure.

Some townspeople complain that during Melamed’s administration property taxes have gone up and parking in some lots is no longer free. Others are unhappy that he has barred strippers from bars. And some Whistlerites say Melamed changed his stripes on the Olympics issue.

But Nancy Wilhelm-Morden, a local lawyer who was originally opposed to the Games, wrote in an e-mail message, “They’re here, and I am happy to welcome everyone and show off our town.”

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In 1978, he took part in a relay race on Whistler Mountain.

Defending his support of the Games, Melamed said: “The community made a choice. We live in a democratic society, and when 70 percent of the community says you go down this path, you go down that path.”

He said that for an investment of $9 million or so, raised through a tax on hotel rooms, Whistler stood to benefit a hundredfold.

“Now I can say, thank goodness we had the Olympics to at least mitigate some of the economic downturn,” he said, though with Intrawest’s financial troubles, it may take years to do the accounting.

Melamed said that, aside from watching it go up, he and his office had nothing to do with the design and construction of the Whistler Sliding Centre.

“This is one of those areas where municipal government absolutely shouldn’t be involved; we have to defer to the experts,” he said.

Even experts could not influence the weather.

“If you live in the mountains, you know that the weather is something you can’t control,” he said, adding, “On Monday, the skies finally opened up a little for the men’s downhill, and it was very, very beautiful.”

Melamed says he does not get on the slopes as much as he would like, and he no longer has the raccoonlike markings — tanned face, pale eyes — of the dedicated ski bum. He said he had been stockpiling ski days in anticipation of the Olympics and had managed to get out once since they began.

“I’m missing it,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on February 21, 2010, on page SP5 of the New York edition with the headline: A Ski Bum Turned Politician Revels in the Olympic Spotlight. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe